Elegy for Richard Hugo

Elegy for Richard Hugo

(1923-1982)

You said to wait ten years before

trying to write an elegy about someone

who just died. I waited more than three times

that. No doubt it's not enough.

So, something here about a lake's face

changing--ripple, riffle, wrinkle; you

said never use semicolons. (I’m kidding

a kidder.) "Be glad to fish

with you sometime," you wrote in

in the one letter to me, "but I warn you,

I'm strictly a bait fisherman.” If that

were on Twitter now, I'd favorite (a verb, sir)

it and tweet back, No worries. You

haven't missed much. Let's say

a man sits on a rock. He's connected

to a lake, call it Saw Lake, by a fishing

line. He's not really waiting for anything.

He’s drinking beer. A hit, a strike, would be fine,

a rousing thing. Just over the ridge

doesn't lie a town. That's why

nobody's heard of it. I will say

women and men who work at the factory

there return from a women's softball

game, someone won, who cares. Now

everybody will wash their hair, their bodies,

put on clean jeans, heave on the nice

boots, and go out and dance and drink

and kiss and hug and fight. The

man on the rock has seen the rusted

iron roofs of just that town. He

wonders if he should call them rooves.

The lake tugs him away from words

but not for long. "There you go," he says.

Hans Ostrom copyright 2016

Top 50 Science Fiction Novels

The photo is of Arthur C. Clarke



I just posted on this topic over on my department's blog, but if by chance you like lists and/or are looking for a list of sci-fi novels to work through, here is one:

http://www.epic-fantasy.com/

I'd describe myself as a reader who's always dabbled in science fiction, but I'm about as far from being an expert on the subject as Pluto (which is still a planet, in my opinion) is from Mercury. However, I know quite a few people who do qualify as experts, and they tend to have strong opinions that don't mesh with the opinions of other experts. Also, the fact that list rather loosely mixes sci-fi, fantasy, and more-or-less realistic fiction that is merely speculative (like On the Beach) is no doubt a bone of contention, like the bone that goes up in the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Please pretend the titles are in Italics.

I don't know of any well known poets who also dabbled in sci-fi writing, but I'm sure there must be, or must have been, some. Richard Hugo wrote one genre-novel--a detective novel with a great title: Death and the Good Life. Karl Shapiro wrote a realistic novel, Edsel. As far as I know, neither writer tried more than one novel. Poet Stephen Dobyns became a bona fide writer of crime fiction.

I'll just add that a lot of sci-novels have terrific poetry-like title. I mean, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,--what a great title for a poem that would have been! In cinematic form, it became Blade Runner, but you knew that.

Anyway, the list:

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Glimpses of Towns

(image: a piece of a road-map of Sweden, including
Söderfors)






My goodness, Washington (the state) is flooding. The combination of much recent snow in the high country plus what we call "The Pineapple Exress"--lots and lots of warm rain from the Pacific--have made many rivers burst. The nearby town of Orting is in danger of going under water. It also has the dubious honor of being in the path of a major lava-flow, should Mt. Rainier decide to wake up. Fire and rain, indeed.

Of course, I picked this day to ride the train north to Bellingham, pick up a car, and drive it back. Things went fine, although even Interstate 5 was covered with water in places, and there were menacing signs about side-highways being closed.

I stopped in the small town of Darrington to get a bite to eat--and thought of Richard Hugo, who dearly loved to visit the small towns of Washington and Montana and write poems about them--well, not really about them so much as about the responses they generated in him. In The Triggering Town, Hugo advises not knowing too much about the towns. He encouraged poets to make all sorts of (unfounded) assumptions. So if I were following his advice, I would assume that the waitress who served me food came in second in the homecoming-queen contest.

Many moons ago, in Sweden, I stopped briefly in Söderfors, Sweden, a former steel and manufacturing town (no doubt some things are still manufactured there), and based strictly on a few observations and a lot of impressions, I wrote a "triggering-town" poem. As both a reader and a writer, one must assess such poems as poems, not as journalistic reports--unless of course the poem really does present itself as an historical poem--and then a different set of legitimate criteria come into play. I remember that a municipal clock wasn't keeping the right time--a charming detail, as far as I was concerned. I remember being exceedingly fascinated by the color of bricks used in many buildings in the town: black. Perhaps the clay used to make the bricks was full of iron or another kind of mineral/metal. . . . On the train-ride today, I saw some "violent brown-black water" rushing off hillsides and out of culverts. . . .

. . .And here's hoping the rivers in Western Washington crest soon and recede quickly, as I post the Söderfors poem:

Söderfors, Sweden


Brown mortar, black bricks, buildings
from industry’s youth.

Two girls walk along a narrow
sandy path over the dam. Violent brown-black
water rushes through
the spillway. A sign cautions.

A gull nests in a granite slab.
(Incubation is a branch of geology.)

Reach for the black bricks—
to know them. Their texture is glass.
They were cooked to the point
at which manufacturing gives way

to beautiful compounds. Söderfors
is a silent town. Its cast-iron clock
is ornate and wrong. Bright green,

nearly lime: that used to be the color
of a rusting Saab parked all by itself.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Now there's an enticing topic--the semicolon in modern thought.

There are two kinds of writers; one kind thinks there are two kinds of everything in the world; the other kind doesn't.

Actually, what I meant to say was that one kind likes semicolons and the other doesn't.

For example, poet Richard Hugo, In The Triggering Town, calls the semicolon "ugly." He refused to use it in his poetry. Maybe he used it in his technical writing at Boeing, but I doubt it. Whenever we get to that part of the book in class, at least one student says, "But I love the semicolon," and I always agree with the student. The semicolon possesses its own awkward beauty, as far as punctuation-marks goes; in fact, the semicolon refuses to punctuate; it semi-punctuate; it ends something but not really.

But there are so many problems with the semicolon. By U.S. rules, you are not supposed to use it unless there is an independent clause on both sides of it; moreover, the very fact that one has to start talking about clauses puts people to sleep--as does further discussion of coordinating conjunctions versus sentence-adverbs. One may also use the semicolon to separate items in a series that are so large they include commas. In England, as far as I know, the rules for using the semicolon are different, just as there is no "comma splice" in German. After all, these are printers' marks, these periods, commas, dashes, and semicolons--based on venerable handwriting marks. It's not like they existed in the deep grammar of our brains.

Of course, the main problem is that a semicolon is a period on top of a comma. The semiotics of this situation suggest indecision or error.

Anyway . . .: a poem concerning the semicolon:


The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Concerning Joy

Poet Hayden Carruth died last week. I did not read and have not read a lot of his work, but what I did read was good, in my opinion. Also, he did seem to have one of those names that seemed manufactured just for a poet. He's considered an important American poet.

My most specific memory regarding him goes back to an evening maybe two decades ago when I was having dinner with three other poets, Lee Bassett, Sam Hamill (best or most recently known for the Poets Against the War project, but also a fine poet, translator, and publisher), and Madeline DeFrees. This was not long after Richard Hugo had died, and Madeline was angry about a bad review Carruth had written about Hugo--maybe it was about his collected poems. I don't know. I never tracked down the review. I just remember that Madeline, not the type to anger easily, was pretty miffed at Carruth's review, especially where it (according to her) had observed that Hugo "had no hear"--for poetry, that is. Hugo's poetry is deliberately clipped and sometimes purposely monotonous and/or staccato, but he had a great sense of language. My own view is that he was writing in the way he'd heard language when he was growing up, working class, Pacific Northwest. And he just leaned more toward the Anglo Saxon side of the language as opposed to the Latin side. Carruth probably just didn't get what Hugo was doing, but Hugo had studied with Roethke, after all, and Roethke was all about sound. If you've read Hugo's The Triggering Town, you know Hugo was almost all about sound, too.

To digress from the digression, the NY Times obituary (which I think I found online) of Carruth mentioned his once saying that he wrote a lot about loss, a statement that made me giggle because, well, don't we all write about loss, even people who don't write? Then I scolded myself for a) giggling and b) writing about loss too much myself. So I made one of those precipitous resolutions. I resolved to write about joy more. I don't know precisely why I chose joy as the opposite of loss when gain, possession, interest-accrued, or permanence would probably have been more reasonable choices as opposites to loss. Fulfilling the resolution hasn't gone all that well, but here's one poem, at least, allegedly on joy--with one of my classic, numbingly obvious titles, which Carruth probably would have hated, along with my poetry, although I doubt if he ever read even one by me, unless maybe one I had in Ploughshares. (Anyway, Mr. Carruth, I'm sorry you're dead.)


Concerning Joy


When an infant laughs,
especially at nothing,
joy has scrawled a note
for anyone to read
and get a giggle.

When people see someone
they love receive what's right,
joy juices a corpuscle of time.

When you sense that thing
move through you, the one
that feels as if your bones
just told a joke to your nerves,
which then told your feet
to dance (knowing full well
your feet ache) joy just might
have been nearby. Mercurial,

needed, and nimble,
as small as a thimble
and as big as a moon,
joy is, I'm telling you,
welcome most any time,
including midnight,
noon, and soon. I'm

saying something about
joy, okay? I'm not trying
to reproduce it, so don't
get all joyless on me. If
joy comes to you, let it.
If it doesn't, ask around.
See what you can find out.
Somebody has to know something.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Want to Write a Ten-Line Poem for Tuesday?

Following is a "prompt" for a ten-line poem. Of course, such prompts in and of themselves still strike many writers and readers as counterintuitive if not absurd or insulting, a prevailing assumption being that poems spring from poets naturally and need not and cannot be elicited by anything as formulaic as a prompt--an assignment. I

In The Triggering Town, however, Richard Hugo--arguably as intuitive a poet as there ever was--praised assignments given to him and others by their teacher, Theodore Roethke. Hugo describes one such assignment in the book, and the assignment is brutal in its requirements. Hugo maintains that as one part of the mind focuses on the artificial limits of the assignment, another part goes in unpredictable but productive directions, and you come up with material you probably would not have discovered otherwise. Of course, all prompts and assignments come with a codicil or two: one always has the right to rewrite the draft so drastically that traces of the prompt may disappear altogether; one has the right to take just one line, image, or idea from the draft and go off in a completely different direction; and so on. So this really isn't like paint-by-numbers because you can paint over the canvas as much and as often as you like.

In fashioning the prompt, I borrowed some other notions from the Triggering Town, including Hugo's suggestion that poets should let themselves be led on--to the next word or the next line, for instance--more because of sound or arbitrary decisions than because of a more linear or single-minded desire to pursue a message, as one does, for example, in an essay. Also, Hugo disliked "connective" or "transition" words such as "but," "however," and "although." He also suggests that if a poet asks a question in a poem, he or she should not then answer the question; otherwise, he argues, the question wasn't worth asking (from a poetic point of view). I'm just paraphrasing what he wrote, so don't kill the messenger.

If indeed you're tempted to be prompted, take pleasure in the writing, and probably everything will work out just fine. And we're making a poem here--a first draft, at that--not performing emergency heart-surgery. So there's that. You'll notice that the topic and "sense" of the poem are left entirely up to you. The prompt:

A ten-line, free-verse poem. Start by writing a first line. Then follow steps 1 through 11.

1. Rewrite the first line, rearranging the syntax:

Example:

The blue lake still resembles slate.
The still lake is slated to resemble blue.

2. Write a second line in which, at some point, you repeat a sound from the first.

3. If the second line did not end in a one-syllable word, make sure, now, that it does.

4. Phrase line three has a question.

5. In line five, do NOT answer the question in line four but do include a word that includes the letter “u," and make doubly sure this line contains an image.

6. Line six should be either a very short line or a very long line—in relation to previous lines.

7. Take a break and review lines one through six. Cross out any connecting words like and, but, while, although, so, or then.

8. Line 7 should include words of one syllable each. You are allowed one exception.

9. To start line 8, write a last word of that line. Now finish line 8 by working backwards, moving to the next-to-last word, and so on, until you write the first word of the line.

10. In line 9, write anything you like but make the sound and rhythm similar to those in line 8.

11. Do whatever you want in line 10.

Answering Questions In Poems

In his book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (W.W. Norton, 1979, but still in print), Richard Hugo includes a chapter on "Nuts and Bolts" in which he gives such specific advices as "use no. 2 pencils," "never erase--just cross out [lines or words you don't like as you write]", and "If you ask a question [in a poem], don't answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. . . .If you can answer the question [in a poem], to ask it is a waste of time" (p. 40).



Of course, the business about pencils is a bit tongue-in-cheek--but also refreshingly specific, especially in contrast to the tired, vague advice usually given to writers, such as "write what you know" or "show, don't tell." Because poetry and fiction concern imagination, or making things up, one is always writing what one doesn't know even when s/he is writing what s/he knows. And sometimes it's better to tell rather than show. You just never know.



A student in class reacted to some of this advice (from Hugo) by saying that it made him want to do just the opposite of what Hugo advised; he had the "don't-tell-me-what-do-do" response, not a bad one for a poet to have. Probably Hugo himself would endorse the reaction, and of course most writers and teachers of writing assume that when they give advice, it will be taken, dismissed, and/or modified but that each of these three responses is fine as long as it works. No doubt Hugo deliberately gives specific advice on seemingly trivial matters (in some cases) just to get poets thinking specifically about how they write, not to get them to write exactly as he does.



In the following poem, I think I unintentionally followed Hugo's advice about not answering questions. The poem does ask and answer questions (a no-no), but, arguably, it also answers questions not asked (okay according to Hugo's "rules"). (It's interesting that all politicians answer questions not asked, but probably not for poetic reasons.) The poem first appeared in Poetry Northwest (Spring 1987), a venerable magazine (founded at the University of Washignton, edited by David Wagoner for a long time) that went out of business but was just revived--in Oregon, I believe. Rather belatedly, I'll "dedicate" the poem to the late Richard Hugo. I never met him, but we exchanged letters once in which fishing was mentioned. Here's the poem:





From Another Part of the Forest


How are you today?
Ten dead fish float in the lake.

May I help you?
Five cattle lie in the shade.

Won’t you please sit down?
A bobcat rakes a deer’s back.

Do you love me?
A butterfly folds up its wings.

What are you waiting for?
Seven geese waddle toward a pond.

Are you sure?
A frog jumps from a log into mud.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom. First published in Poetry Northwest (Spring 1987).

Poems Grow In Language

Whether spoken or written, poems are language, so to some extent it's absurd to claim that poems grow in language the way plants grow in soil.


The idea behind such a comparison can be useful to poets, however, because sometimes poets are so determined to say something--to send a message, make an argument, or get a point across--that they forget they are making something (a poem) not just saying something.


At one point in his famous book on creative writing and the teaching thereof, the late Richard Hugo, a Pacific Northwest poet who went to high school near Seattle and worked at Boeing for a while, advises, "If you want to communicate, buy a phone." With exaggeration and with tongue close if not in cheek, Hugo is trying to get young poets not to focus exclusively on getting a message across, on being profound. His book is The Triggering Town, and in it he develops a variety of strategies and techniques for learning how to dance between "saying" and "making." He often urges the reader to err on the side of letting language "tell" you what to write rather than on the side of insisting that the language say what you want it to say. He is not, I hasten to add, arguing on behalf of obscurity or obfuscation, or for laziness that leads to lack of clarity. He worked hard on his poems, and he insists that all poets should work hard. Nor is he pointing the way to what is now known as L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, in which poets seem, at least, to write words randomly, or at least to make leaps of thought and free-association that are hard to follow. I'm among those who simply don't "get" L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, but I confess that in this as in other matters, I may be revealing myself to be a curmudgeon, and I don't object to the fact that others do "get" such poetry.


Hugo writes, "Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up on the option of finding something better. If you have to say it, you will." That is, another part of his approach is to operate from the belief that our obsessions, the things we "have" to say, are going to emerge in our work no matter what, so it's best for us to concentrate on the making, not the saying, and often to let language and revision lead us and our poems-in-progress to surprising places and, one hopes, to surprisingly better poems.


Here is a poem that sprang from language itself; in fact, it started with a two-word phrase that had stuck in my head: "padre, noonday." I've always loved the word padre. It just sounds so great, and for a native Californian, it conjures images of Spanish priests wearing dark robes and getting missions built on El Camino Real. "Noonday" is a pleasing word, too, but it's also a bit confusing. What not just say "noon" or "mid-day"?


At any rate, I started playing with the phrase, and at some point, I came up with the first stanza:


Old padre, dry
as a cricket’s chirp,
as a lizard’s burp—
old padre, why



I associate crickets and grasshoppers not just with the sounds they make but with the dry summer grass of the Sierra Nevada in summer, and sometimes crickets do sound as if they need to wet their whistle--although I believe they make that sound by rubbing their legs together, so they don't literally chirp with their mouths. I followed that cricket-comparison witch "a lizard's burp," so I'd effectively committted myself to a certain rhyme-scheme--the In Memoriam rhyme-scheme, named after Tennyson's long poem of the same name, in which the stanzas rhyme a-b-b-a. I'd also commited myself to very short lines, and with the fourth line, I'd commited myself to asking the priest a question. Eventually, I managed to finish the poem, with the rhyme-scheme and short lines and also with the suggestion of a story concerning a priest in a village who, like mad dogs and Englishmen, goes out in the noonday sun:


Padre, Noonday



Old padre, dry
as a cricket’s chirp,
as a lizard’s burp—
old padre, why

do you go to the well
at blazing mid-day
when everyone’s away
in shade, in sleep? Tell

why even the town’s
lunatic has enough sense
to nap under an immense
oak, but not you. My own

notion is it’s not
for water that you
come, surely not to
set an example. What

then? Is it to show
yourself to God’s blaze
of scrutiny, God’s gaze,
before you go?


I seem to have invented the possibility that the padre is showing himself to God--confessing himself--by going out in the brutal heat. I think the poem does end up communicating something, saying something, but it got there by the circuitous route of my having concentrated first on playing with language, or working with language. The poem pleases me in part because it's a surprise, a nice little gift given to me by the process of writing. I like the combination of very short lines and the a-b-b-a scheme, and I like the half-rhyme of town's/own, although I would certainly understand if other readers wanted a full rhyme there. Richard Hugo may not have liked the poem at all. I just don't know. I don't think he liked poems this terse, this short. But he may have liked the play of language, and he may have liked the hint of an invented town, a "triggering town," in this case some imaginary village in arid or semi-arid territory. In any event, "Padre, Noonday" is, like all other poems, made of language, but figuratively, at least, it also grew from language-itself, as opposed to being driven by a message.